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Strange Pairing on Hall Ballot

Having Marvin Miller and Bowie Kuhn on the same Hall of Fame ballot is like having Alex Rodriguez and Carl Pavano on the same players ballot. Yet there they are, Miller and Kuhn, together as candidates on the executives ballot of the newly constituted election format for the Hall of Fame.

A committee of 12 electors is scheduled to meet today in Cooperstown, N.Y., to discuss the 10 candidates on the ballot and vote on them. Candidates need at least nine votes to be elected to the Hall of Fame. Hall officials will announce the results tomorrow.

This is the third time in five years on the ballot for Miller, the players’ labor leader from 1966 to 1983, and Kuhn, baseball’s commissioner from 1969 to 1984. They were supposed to wait until 2011 for their next shot at the Hall, but its board of directors was frustrated that the veterans committee wasn’t electing anyone and changed the system for the second time in five years.

The latest change could benefit Kuhn and cost Miller. In the two elections under the previous system, Kuhn plummeted to 14 votes from 20, and Miller rose to 51 from 35 (61 needed for election). But the new committee is heavily weighted with management representatives, 7 of the 12, and no one knows how they will view Miller, the owners’ archenemy.

Can anyone really imagine David Glass, the avowed antiunion owner of the Kansas City Royals, voting for Miller? Bill Giles, the chairman of the Philadelphia Phillies, was one of the union’s chief targets in its collusion cases against the owners in the 1980s. Is he going to vote for Miller?

“People have asked me about it,” Miller said, speaking of the committee’s makeup. “I don’t know why they did this except, other than me, it makes sense to have a group like this because they are a management-oriented group voting on management people.”

Besides Miller and Kuhn, the candidates are the owners Walter O’Malley, John Fetzer, Ewing Kauffman and Barney Dreyfuss and the club officials John McHale, Buzzie Bavasi, Bob Howsam and Gabe Paul.

“If you have a number of management people and you want to get some of them in,” said Miller, always with a clear view of issues, “it makes sense to have a list of voters who are a jury of peers of these people. Other management people who knew them who were aware of what they did or didn’t do. They’re a perfect group to make a decision. It breaks down, though, if I’m one of the candidates. They are not a jury of my peers but a jury of my antagonists.”

How would Miller feel if Kuhn was elected and he wasn’t? “It wouldn’t bother me particularly,” he said.

Such a result, though, would be mind-boggling. The guidelines given voters tell them to consider a candidate’s contributions to baseball but don’t mention impact. No one on the ballot has made as great an impact on baseball as Miller. His efforts changed the game forevermore.

As much as my Brooklyn-born friends don’t agree, O’Malley made the next-greatest impact, moving his team west and opening the entire country to baseball.

Kuhn’s impact? Nothing comes to mind. In fact, Kuhn, who died in March, was a reactionary commissioner, who, left to his own devices, would have kept baseball in the dark ages. If nothing else, consider Kuhn’s retrogressive view of free agency.

“There was no doubt in my mind that the game’s integrity and public confidence were at stake in the potential destruction of the reserve system,” Kuhn wrote in his 1987 autobiography, “Hardball.”

In his 1991 book, “A Whole Different Ball Game,” written to a large extent to respond to what he viewed as Kuhn’s outrageous assertions in “Hardball,” Miller recalled how Kuhn, in arguing against free agency, said it “would mean the loss to bankruptcy of the entire American League as well as several teams in the National League.”

Baseball, Miller quoted Kuhn as saying, will never survive “unless we find oil under second base.” Baseball has found no oil, but its revenue surpassed $6 billion for the first time this year.

Miller also wrote, “He ridiculed the entire concept as ‘nothing more than one of those myths Miller spent so much time inventing.’”

Long after he left office, Kuhn clung to his myth. He believed he could have yanked the Messersmith-McNally grievance from the arbitrator, Peter Seitz. “In hindsight,” Kuhn wrote, “my greatest regret about my 16 years as commissioner is that I did not take that grievance and head off Seitz.” Not even Kuhn’s lawyers believed he had the right to take that outrageous step.

Player candidates for the Hall of Fame are judged on what they did when they played. Executives can be judged on what they did when they were executives, but also on what they did that lived after them. Miller’s legacy is clear. Kuhn’s lack of foresight and vision is also clear.

A Fact Not in Evidence

Arte Moreno, the owner of the Angels of Anaheim, may believe the Mitchell report on steroid use in baseball will name names. He may fervently hope the report names names. But contrary to his quoted comments the other day, he does not know if the report will name names.

“The names of players will come out that people will be mad about,” Moreno told The Los Angeles Times. “Some of my information is secondhand, but I know there’s going to be names.”

Why Moreno made the assertion isn’t known; he was said to be traveling and didn’t return a telephone call seeking an explanation. But Commissioner Bud Selig has said he does not know if Mitchell will identify users, and management and union lawyers have said they don’t know. So how would Moreno know?

Seeing a drunken Tony La Russa on the Internet should be enough to scare any baseball figure straight.

The police officers in Jupiter, Fla., who arrested La Russa in March, released the video that they routinely take of such arrests. The video quickly made its way to the Internet.

First, the police are seen trying to wake up La Russa, the St. Louis manager, who was sleeping at the wheel of his car with his foot on the brake around midnight.

“You know who this is?” one of the officers says. “It’s La Russa.”

La Russa tells the officer he consumed two glasses of wine and was tired because he had awakened at 6 a.m.

La Russa is told to walk back and forth, heel to toe, with his arms spread, then he is told to touch his nose with the tip of a finger from each hand. He is instructed to recite the alphabet and handles the task well until he gets to the end and says “x-y-x-z.”

La Russa is then handcuffed behind his back and taken into custody.

“There’s a difference between being asleep at the wheel and passed out,” La Russa says, riding in the back of the police car. “I would challenge passed out.”

La Russa is charged with driving under the influence (he pleaded guilty last week) and agrees to take a Breathalyzer test. Told he tested 0.093 and 0.092, above Florida’s legal limit of 0.08, La Russa asks: “Is that significant? What would be really high for a number that would get you really concerned?”

Near the end of the tape, La Russa asks, “Do you know what I do for a living?”

“That was my next question,” the officer says. “What line of work are you in?”

Anyone in professional baseball would want to avoid the embarrassment of everyone else in baseball as well as fans seeing him in such a taped performance.

Bringing Some Baggage

Ryan Church, the outfielder the Mets acquired Friday from Washington, comes with a reputation for religious beliefs that will probably not make him a favorite of all Mets fans.

Two years ago, Church told The Washington Post about a conversation he had with the Nationals’ chapel leader, Jon Moeller.

“I said, like, Jewish people, they don’t believe in Jesus,” The Post quoted Church as saying. “Does that mean they’re doomed? Jon nodded, like, that’s what it meant. My ex-girlfriend! I was like, man, if they only knew. Other religions don’t know any better. It’s up to us to spread the word.”

Made aware of Church’s comments by Rabbi Ari Sunshine, then in North Carolina, now in Maryland, Bud Selig replied that he was “deeply offended” and found them offensive.

Church subsequently apologized. The Mets, sensitive to the incident, delayed making the trade for a week while they checked into it. They found that Moeller had been responsible for prompting the comments from Church.